Night Flights is a nocturnal examination of public urban staircases. The series has been made over the past two years using digital cameras and common flashlights to produce archival pigment prints. The lowest and highest points of a public staircase are often difficult to find. There is no sense of ceremony announcing them. The view from the bottom is usually unremarkable, while that at the top can be breathtaking. But the stairs themselves simply are, conveyances up and down. The population of the staircases shifts when night falls. During daylight hours, locals use them for exercise more than to get from one place to another. When the sun goes down they’re replaced by other creatures who come out to do what they need to for survival. Coyotes can be heard yipping in the distance after a kill, while owls hoot and ground animals scurry around in the darkness. In the 1920s a network of staircases was built into the myriad hillsides that dotted the city during their development as residential neighborhoods.  I’ve lived amidst these staircases for over 40 years, and yet had only had a marginal awareness of the extent of their existence until I began using them to get around on a regular basis. The stairs contain vestiges of all that has happened in their vicinity since they were built, as if trapped in concrete. Yes, there were Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges, who famously used them as film locations, but there have to have been a plethora of large and small dramatic events in people’s lives that played themselves out in these places unrecorded. I’m not a night person, yet I find myself moving through the city after dark. There are very few people about at this hour and I’m acutely aware of the proximity of nearby houses and apartments, some of them no more than a few feet from the stairs. It feels like an invasion of their privacy to be here, as if the occupants are unwillingly sharing their personal space with anyone who happens by. And I’m here with a camera and flashlights, no less. Remarkably, none of these people have taken offense at my presence or asked what I’m doing. So much of my work has been dedicated to finding a way to define environments and the structures and objects that occupy them. This has often meant suppressing my personal point of view in favor of an apparently objective one. This is a false premise at best. Every decision that goes into making even the most clinical photographic rendering of a building, for instance, requires that subjective decisions be made. Angle of view, camera height, what’s included in the frame, time of day and time of year, which determine the angle of the sun, weather conditions, and so forth all go into determining what a photograph will look like. Less tangible, though, are the frame of mind of the photographer at the time of exposure, and their emotional responses to what they’re confronted with. With this series I have attempted to acknowledge what it felt like to be in these very specific places. By working in this manner I have come much closer to experiencing what drew me to the medium in the first place, leaving myself vulnerable to the anticipation of not knowing what lies beyond the next step of the staircase or turn of the path: the uncertainty of the outcome each time the shutter is released.